If you thought that we were waiting by the phone to get calls from telecom CEOs for the telco innovator’s den then you don’t know us. From the start, we did not think they were going to call. However we were surprised that one of the top 10 telecom CEOs actually got our blog post, read it and considered calling. This is a clear signal that our base message: “The telecom sector needs to innovate or things will get messy” was spot on. There are three things that sell in this world: sex, gossip and controversy. If you want to deliver a message to a large audience that does not want to listen, pick at least one as your theme and build a guerrilla marketing campaign around it.

If you think that we are now organising the Bitpipe Accelerator Den, then you are also wrong. Yes we would be able to assist in supplanting inefficient telecoms with efficient Google Mobile and Fiber. However would that serve a lot of people? Do you really want lawyers to start calling you with offers to help you with your divorce because Google detected that your partner is looking into it but hasn’t told you yet? Do we really want to see large 300.000 employees companies reduced to 3000 because they are now bit pipes? Telecom downsizing is not pleasant. So please if you are working in the telecom industry, or in any industry that is the victim of disruptive innovations, then please keep on reading and become a Dinovator…

Dinovators are people that wake up one morning and find that the company in which they have been working for many years has been converted into an IT dinosaur. Not because the employees have been doing something wrong but because the outside world just went too fast and out innovated them. You now have two options: 1) Jump ship 2) Show dinosaurs how to innovate. If you are a Dinovator you prefer option two.

So how can you innovate in a traditionally minded company? You can go and show slides. You can go and tell everybody that the wolf is coming. However we tried those approaches years ago and you will fail. Majorities and laggards don’t want the status quo to change because they have a vested interest in it and they don’t know if they will have so in the new reality.

What works however is seeing magic with your own eyes. Anybody that has seen and touched the future can’t deny it any more. Now how can you show the future to people? First of all you need to understand their problems. If in the telecom industry the problem is revenue generation, then don’t go and show them a new proposal for a better protocol or faster network. Show them how new revenue can be generated, churn reduced, cost reduced, OTT revenue generated, etc.

So if you are technical then you can use the cheapest X86 server with 6 ports or any other device you can get your hands on and put an open source operating system like Snappy Ubuntu Core and you can create some Snappy Apps to show that there is a better future and can convert it into the smartest switch that solves the 4 biggest telecom industry problems. You can use the open source Juju charms and some cloud to show how complex telecom software can be abstracted and how for instance an open source SMSC can have a rest API with three parameters [to, from & message] and still deliver the same SMS service as that very expensive box that has all types of SMPP and other useless APIs and takes months to integrate with. If you are in financial services, retail, logistics, industrial, energy, etc. then you can probably find some other cheap box that can be Snappyfied or open source software that can be charmed so you can show your magic.

If you are not technical but have access to suppliers then you just ask them to surprise you with what they can come up with if they would apply disruptive innovations like Snappy and Juju. If you promise them that you will arrange a meeting with the boss of your boss if they surprise you, then they will be happy and surprise you for sure.

However to accelerate “dinovation” and to be inspired with what a community of dinovators can do, our proposal is to use Twitter. Just tweet a 1 minute video or a short blog post about your “dinovation” and include #dinovator and @telruptive. If you see tweets with great “dinovations” then you retweet them and share them with colleagues, customers, partners and bosses. This way you can become part of the the Dinovator Movement. The Dinovator Movement is not accepting that companies that have been around for many years are useless and need to be substituted. The Dinovator Movement is about showing that even in the most traditional companies there are Dinovators at work that show how that company needs to adapt to the new reality. The Dinovators explain to management that what is needed is Innovator’s Dens in which partners, customers, suppliers, etc. are invited to participate and innovation can be accelerated without RFPs and wasting everybody’s time. A Dinovator wants their company to embrace the new reality and thrive on it. Open Source has made becoming a Dinovator super easy. Nobody will put a critical system in production without paid support so even business people will be happy with open source Dinovations. However open source has a magical power, it does not get stopped by RFPs. So use its power. Have a Dinovator Day…

Today I had a meeting that could be the beginning of the end of RFPs to buy software. RFPs are the tool established buyers and vendors use to keep new entrants at bay. However I haven’t met anybody that says they love writing or responding to them. The effect of RFPs on software is perverse. The main problem is that you can’t ask if your software is beautiful, easy to use, fast to integrate, efficient, effective at solving a business problem, secure, etc. Instead you ask if you provide training, because you assume it is ugly and difficult. You ask if they offer consultancy services and an SDK or connector library because you assume it is difficult. You assume you need to customise it for months because it will not be effective out of the box. But most importantly since you will be stuck with the software for years, you ask if it supports any potential feature that perhaps in 5 years might be needed for 5 minutes. It is this last set of questions that kill any innovation and ease of use in business software. A product manager in the receiving end will get funding to add those absurd features when customers ask for them. A career limiting move would be to ask for budget to reduce useless features or tell that your product looks worse than Frankenstein.

So how can you make sure that software is beautiful, does what it supposed to efficiently and effectively, is fast, nimble, easy to use, secure, scalable, fast to integrate, is future proof, etc.? You do what you do when you buy a car, you go and ask the keys of different models and take them for a serious spin and put them to their limits.

So what you propose is a three months PoC for each potential solution?
No what I propose is being able to get your hands on all different alternative software solutions and deploying, integrating and scaling them in hours or even minutes and then release a bunch of automatic performance tests and rough end-users, even some ethical hackers or competitors.

If the software does what it says on the tin, is effective, efficient, beautiful, secure, fast, scalable, easy, etc. then you negotiate pricing or use it for a minimum valuable product.

It used to be impossible to do all of this in hours but with solutions to deploy quickly private clouds and cloud orchestration solutions like Juju, we are actually planning on trying this approach with a real customer and real suppliers. To be continued…

Charles – Chuck – Butler, a colleague at Canonical, wrote a very nice blog post explaining the basics of Big Data. It does not only explain them but it also allows anybody to set up Big Data solutions in minutes via Juju. Really recommended reading:

This is a good example of the power of cloud orchestration. Some expert creates charms and bundles them with Juju and afterwards anybody can easily deploy, integrate and scale this Big Data solution in minutes.

Samuel Cozannet, another colleague, used some of these components to create an open source Tweet sentiment analysis solution that can be deployed in 14 minutes and includes autoscaling, a dashboard, Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, etc. He presented it on the OpenStack Developer Summit in Paris and will be providing instructions for everybody to set it up shortly.

It is not often that one is responsible for cloud [and Big Data and IoT] strategy in a company of 600 people and you get told by the OpenStack foundation that your solution went from 55% market share to 64% while competitors like RedHat, HP, VMWare, etc. are spending hundreds [or more] of times more on marketing and engineering than you. Now I would love to claim responsibility for it but I would be lying. My mentors, Mark Shuttleworth and Simon Wardley, have laid the foundations years before I joined the company. But Ubuntu and Canonical, the company behind it, are the poster child example of why promoting chief financial officers into strategic roles in the last ten years was a terrible idea. Bean counters are about to inflict potentially irreparable damage onto iconic hardware and legacy software vendors. The reason is really easy: disruptive innovation. The innovator’s dilemma explained it years ago already. When some initial inferior technology comes along like Cloud Computing and OpenStack, then existing vendors will not get any demand from existing customers. Only when technology matures will customers start defecting en masse. But then already other companies have years of a head-start. Add to it that Ubuntu OpenStack is not only the most innovative solutions but also wants to be the most flexible [see our Autopilot, OIL, MAAS and Juju for more details] and the cheapest. So if you are on a quarter-based projected revenue track and you find out that your competitor is doing those three things extremely well, then it might be time to brush up those skills and experiences on your CV. Regarding the future, let me just tell you that the best is still to come 🙂

Every day a new orchestration solution is being presented to the world. This post is not about which one is better but about what will happen if you embrace these new technologies.

The traditional scale-up architecture
Before understanding the new solutions, let’s understand what is broken with the current solutions. Enterprise IT vendors have traditionally made software that was sold based on the number of processors. If you were a small company you would have 5 servers, if you were big you would have 50-1000 servers. With the cloud anybody can boot up 50 servers in minutes, so reality has changed. Small companies can manage easily 10000 servers, e.g. think of successful social or mobile startups.

Also software was written optimised for performance per CPU. Many traditional software comes with a long list of exact specifications that need to be followed in order for you to get enterprise support.

Big bloated frameworks are used to manage the thousands of features that are found in traditional enterprise solutions.

The container micro services future
Enterprise software is often hard to use, integrate, scale, etc. This is all the consequence of creating a big monolithic system that contains solutions for as many use cases possible.

The best micro services architecture is one where important use cases are reflected in one service, e.g. the shopping cart service deals with your list of purchases however it relies on the session storage service and the identity service to be able to work.

Each service is ran in a micro services container and services can be integrated and scaled in minutes or even seconds.

What benefits do micro services and orchestration bring?
In a monolithic world change means long regression tests and risks. In a micro services world, change means innovation and fast time to market. You can easily upgrade a single service. You can make it scale elastically. You can implement alternative implementations of a service and see which one beats the current implementation. You can do rolling upgrades and rolling rollbacks.

So if enterprise solutions would be available as many reusable services that can all be instantly integrated, upgraded, scaled, etc. then time to market becomes incredibly fast. You have an idea. You implement five alternative versions. You test them. You combine the best three in a new alternative or you use two implementations based on a specific customer segment. All this is impossible with monolithic solutions.

This sounds like we reinvented SOA
Not quite. SOA focused on reusable services but it never embraced containers, orchestration and cloud. By having a container like Docker or a service in the form of a Juju Charm, people can exchange best practice’s instantly. They can be deployed, integrated, scaled, upgraded, etc. SOA only focused on the way services where discovered and consumed. Micro services focus additionally on global reuse, scaling, integration, upgrading, etc.

The future…
We are not quite there yet. Standards are still being defined. Not in the traditional standardisation bodies but via market adoption. However expect in the next 12 months to see micro services being orchestrated at large scale via open source solutions. As soon as the IT world has the solution then industry specific solutions will emerge. You will see communication solutions, retail solutions, logistics solutions, etc. Traditional vendors will not be able to keep pace with the innovation speed of a micro services orchestrated industry specific solution. Expect the SAPs, Oracles, etc. of this world to be in chock when all of a sudden nimble HR, recruiting, logistics, inventory, supplier relationship management solutions, etc. emerge that are offered as SaaS and on-premise often open source. Super easy to use, integrate, manage, extend, etc. It will be like LEGO starting a war against custom made toys. You already know who will be able to be more nimble and flexible…

Today Ubuntu officially launched Juju bundles and Juju quickstart. What does this mean? Via a Juju bundle anybody can create a blueprint solution and allow others to make instant copies. You drag and drop a bundle or you use a one line command and you can in minutes deploy a complete software stack, pre-integrated and scaled, onto any cloud or server.

Many problems can be solved this way. Just the type of solutions that are included in the below blog post show what is possible. Anything from instant SaaS integration, Big Data, programming environments, ERP, Cobol integrations, Telecom solutions, etc. can all be instantly deployed, integrated and scaled.

Like this:

The Linux Foundation shared the below infographics recently. Click on it and you get the associated report. The short message is, if you are an expert in Linux you are in high demand because companies don’t find enough experts due to the Cloud and Big Data boom.

Unless cloning machines are discovered later this year, quickly expanding the number of Linux experts is unlikely to happen. This means total cost of ownership for enterprises is likely to rise. This is ironic since Linux is all about open source and providing some of the most amazing solutions for free.

The obvious alternative is to focus on Microsoft products. They are relatively cheap in total cost of ownership since licenses are “payable” and average Windows skills can be easier found.

However Microsoft is loosing the server war, especially in the web application space. So this is not a winning strategy if you are going to do Cloud.

How to solve the pressing need for Linux talent?

The only possible strategy is to lower the number of experts needed per company. Larger companies always will need some but they should be focused on the “interesting high-value tasks”. This concept of interesting and high-value is key. With the number of cloud servers exploding, we can not expect the number of experts to explode.

Open source products like Puppet and Chef have helped to alleviate the pain for the more “skilled” companies. One DevOp was able to manage more than ten times as many machines as before. Unfortunately these server provisioning tools are not for the faint of heart. They require experts that know both administration and coding.

It is time for the next generation of tools. Ubuntu, the number #1 Cloud operating system, is leading the way with Juju. If Linux wants to continue to be successful then the common problems, the boring problems, the repetitive problems, etc. should be solved. Solved by Linux gurus in such a way that we, the less IT gifted, can get instant solutions for these common problems.

We need a Linux democracy in which the lesser skilled, but unfortunately the majority, can instantly reuse best-in-class blueprint solutions. Juju is a new class of tools that gives you instant solutions. For all those common problems: scaling a web application, monitoring your infrastructure, sharding MongoDB, replicating a database, installing a Hadoop cluster, setting up continuous integration, etc. Juju can offer solutions. The individual software components have been “charmed”. A Charm allows the software to be instantly deployed, integrated and scaled. However the real revolution is just starting. Juju will have bundles pretty soon. Technically speaking, a bundle is a collection of pre-configured and integrated Charms. In lays speak, a bundle is an instant solution for a common problem. You instantly deploy a bundle [one command or drag-and-drop] and you get a blue-print solution. Since Juju is open source, the community can create as many instant solutions as there are common problems.

So if you want to scale your IT solutions without stretching neither your budget or cloning your employees and without the lock-in of any proprietary and expensive commercial software, then you should try Juju today. Play with the GUI or install Juju today.

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